Gustavo Rojas, the lecturer on digital strategy and speaker on EAE's Focused Program, analysed the journey that the digital consumer makes in terms of shopping and acquiring a certain product, their relation to brands and the possibilities of making changes to the Customer Journey.
Gustavo Rojas's presentation based on a strategic consumer analysis was very different to approaches that have been used to date, which gave a purely descriptive perspective that barely scratched the surface. Thanks to this strategic analysis, we can gain an understanding of the consumer's needs through methodologies and sciences such as ethnography, in-depth interviews, observation, online trends, remote studies, internal research and web analytics.
"When we speak about consumption, we are talking about the relationships we have with the products in our lives, and this relationship is a tension that we can study and model", explained Gustavo. As such, the Customer Journey implicitly involves negative, positive or happy moments and it is essential that we eliminate any steps that may generate friction.
Gustavo Rojas defines the Customer Journey as the journey that the customer makes when they need to acquire a product of a particular brand. Therefore, this Customer Journey depends to a large extent how they perceive the value of this brand, how it lasts over time and how it is constructed in the consumer's mind. Gustavo Rojas advised the marketing students to develop a strategic perspective that aims to position the brand as the first option in the consumers' minds: "generating value and positive emotional traces over time".
To develop a Customer Journey strategy, it is important to define the target and then carry out fieldwork with them to understand their habits, customs and in-depth insights, as well as the social and emotional benefits they gain from the service they receive from a particular brand. In short, we have to understand the person at an individual level and find out how they relate to their surroundings through their psycho-cognitive, social and cultural responses, which make this journey meaningful.
The speaker on EAE's Focused Program explained that it is essential to detect the interactions and life contexts of each user to explore how technologies resolve human needs because "we sometimes lose sight of the real meaning and design products that are removed from reality. If we connect with the consumer and manage to empathize with them, having a real insight into their interests, we can enhance the customer journey and experience".
As far as Gustavo Rojas is concerned, the user experience is the "set of factors and elements related to the user's interaction with a specific environment or device, the result of which is the generation of a positive or negative perception of the service, product or device". There are three big moments that make up this experience: before consuming the brand, the customer's experiences during the shopping process and the lessons learned (the emotional traces that last over time).
Gustavo Rojas combines teaching with his professional activity in Chile, where he is the Director of UX and the Neuromarketing Laboratory at Banco Bci. During this session of the Focused Program, the digital strategy expert defined three consumer archetypes: the analytical consumer, the bargain hunter and the wary consumer. In Rojas's opinion, identifying these types enables us to "document their journey as much as possible so that we can convey information more easily to the company's design team".
The last phase of the Customer Journey is the metrics. To achieve this, every step is measured and, based on this, the overall indicators are reconstructed. The process starts by establishing a set of KPIs for each phase: attracting, exploring, searching, informing, buying and expanding. These keywords may be visitors, CTR, attraction, engagement, searchability, content use, conversion rates and virality rates. It is essential to set measurable and quantifiable KPIs aligned with a certain digital strategy designed to achieve one of the following goals: provoking (to generate awareness), empathizing (to trigger consideration), persuading (to achieve desirability), spur to action (directly oriented at purchasing) or creating a buzz (to generate loyalty).
In this respect, Gustavo emphasized the importance of measuring data in a "comprehensive and quantitative way that enables objectives to be set and real business decisions to be made". With this in mind, the marketing expert concluded by saying that "by combining the quantitative and qualitative indicators, we can optimize the Customer Journey, the end objective of which is to generate value and achieve customer satisfaction, because we are in charge of changing the customer's attitude to our product".
